1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a method and an apparatus for providing information to a mobile terminal, more specifically to a method and an apparatus for providing information to a terminal based on location information of the terminal obtained using a wireless local area network (LAN).
2. Background Art
With the rapid growth of the telecommunications technology, various wireless communication services have been introduced and provided through wireless networks. For example, a wireless communication system provides various services such as voice service using a wireless communication network. Such services have been advanced to a multimedia communication service for transmitting packet data.
Among various wireless Internet services provided through mobile communication terminals, a location based service (LBS) has been particularly popular due to its broad applicability and convenience. The location based service refers to a communication service that detects a location of a mobile communication terminal (e.g., a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant (PDA)) and provides additional information associated with the detected location.
The location determination technology for providing the LBS includes i) a network based method, in which a location of a mobile communication terminal is determined based on a software method of using a radio wave environment of cell coverage of base stations in a mobile communication network, ii) a handset based method, in which the location of a mobile communication terminal is determined using a global positioning system (GPS) receiver installed in the mobile communication terminal, and iii) a hybrid method, in which the network based method and the handset based method are combined.
Of these methods, the network based location determination technology is used more in shadow areas where GPS radio waves are not reachable. However, the network based location determination technology has the shortcoming of possible deterioration of location determination capability due to, for example, repeater environments. Another shortcoming of the network based location determination technology is that a determined location may not be very accurate because the base stations are not densely installed.
As the accurate detection of the location of a terminal would allow more specific information to be provided, the precise determination of the location of the terminal has a very important meaning in a service designed to provide location based information.